Friday, November 09, 2018

Destiny 2 Impressions

Activision is giving everyone on PC the base game for Destiny 2 during November. Just open Battle.net and claim it as a gift.

I gave it a whirl. It's a pretty straightforward looter-shooter. You shoot things and collect loot. I rather like the variety of weapons. The inventory system is great, as it is combined with the character pane. Items are sorted by slot, so it's really easy to use. You can break down unneeded items for cash right away.

It's a little weird, but for a futuristic shooter the story is very "high fantasy", with lots of magic, and magic-like elements running around. I suppose it's kind of necessary for a game where you can respawn from death. The story is fairly mundane so far.

It has a fair amount of cutscenes and lots of voice acting. Nathan Fillion plays a very Nathan-Fillion-esque character. Your character doesn't say anything, but she has an AI companion, Ghost (possibly not an AI but a real ghost), who talks for you. The Ghost also delivers information to your character during missions.

I played a warlock. I'm not entirely sure what the major differences between classes are. It seems to be mostly special abilities, while primary gunplay is very similar.

One thing I had a lot of trouble with was jumping, especially as there are some jumping puzzles in the game. At first I was quite surprised at how difficult these were, but then I finally realized that I was jumping wrong.

I thought that first you pressed Space, and then pressed Space while in flight to activate your suit thrusters. It turns out that there's two completely separate jumps. Just Space is a normal jump, but Space-Space in quick succession at the very start is boosted jump. Once I figured out that there was two different jumps for the warlock, the jumping puzzles became much, much easier.

The ironic part is that when I tried a different class, the Gunslinger, jumping worked more like my original conception.

All in all, Destiny 2 is a decent game. It's free to try, though it is an 80 GB download. I'm not sure it's going to hold my interest though. The community around it is very positive, especially with the latest expansion. Apparently the game at launch was considered to have a lot of issues, but the community greatly approves of the Forsaken expansion.